


Songs and Swanwings

by Rhyolite



Category: Prisoners of Peace Series - Erin Bow
Genre: Gen, Various Other Swan Riders (mentioned)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 00:13:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14883947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyolite/pseuds/Rhyolite
Summary: Sri, singing.





	Songs and Swanwings

It was a song from the place that was no longer hers, from the history that no longer belonged to her. She didn’t sing much. ( _Swan Riders should mostly be silent. They are creepier that way._ ) When she did though, she did it to distract herself from things she didn’t want to sing about. She had used to sing for simple reasons: it was warm, it was raining, she was happy, she was sad, but singing like for those reasons didn’t fit with her silence.

…

_She had sung for an hour (maybe more, she couldn’t remember) after her first ride. (After the first time she had killed someone), droning, quiet, under her breath. It had been classified as routine, uneventful, just arrive, kill the leader, deliver food and medical supplies, help with rebuilding, (ignore the way no one besides other Riders wanted to talk to her anymore, and most of the Riders were grim, dying), leave, report, but 15-year-old-her had flinched at the wrong moment. The quarrel had hit the neck, not the head. (She’s stood for a moment, looking in horror, then shot again. The second time she didn’t miss.) Watching the woman die had shaken her more than she wanted to let others see. (Be strong, silent, you are the will of Talis, death and life balanced on an angel’s wings). She had sung under her breath, but not quietly enough to go unnoticed by the AIs watching from the satellites. She had endured another six months of training for flinching once, and thinly veiled threats from a crazy nine-year-old whose humanity was long gone._

…

She’d buried that part of herself since then, in the four years that followed. Hardened to having her purpose, her job, her _life_ , be killing people and saving more, being nothing but the will of an AI overlord, nothing but the wings she wore. She learned to zoom out, to ignore the details (the person dying in front of her, the _blood_ ) and see only the big picture, the vast swaths of questionable morality that crept over her life like vines over a brick wall.

She learned to unsee people as they died, and to stay silent when she saw a different (better?) way to be.

She danced between the places where her body was just a puppet to be borrowed, something that and AI could download themselves into. She balanced on the edges of what she could remember, and what she could not.

She stayed silent when the first symptoms of Rider’s Palsy presented themselves. How could she not, if saying something meant dying in a place where everyone else was dying, or learning how to die?

And as the gaps in her memories grew longer, the twinges in her vision and the pain that came from nowhere grew more frequent, she pulled a mask over her horror (a new _AI_ ) and she shot first and asked questions as they were bleeding.

Her song unfurled like a banner behind her, quiet but unignorably _there_ , as she and her fellow Swan Riders (world-changers, traitors, murderers) rode away from where they had taken the chance that an AI could learn to be human. She’d first heard the song at a funeral, so she sang it slowly, like the singer had then, morning for their inevitable, too-soon deaths, a tiny act of defiance in the sound. ( _Swan Riders should mostly be silent. They are creepier that way_.)

But there was a flame now. They’d lit a flame amid nonexpressions and silence and the toss of a coin and a shirt buttoned tight at the wrists. There was a chance that the world might, _might_ change for the better, if the flame grew.

 _If_ it grew. Not when. If.  Confidence could (would?) be their downfall. 


End file.
